Live data from Hacker News

Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market

reuters.com

361–370 of 632 posts

Re: Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market

#361
post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you changed every part of a boat, does the original EOL of the boat still make sense ? Yes there are unremplacable parts in a nuclear reactor, but if it's measured to be safe to continue, then there is no reason to respect the initial EOL.

Corners get cut on refurbishment, for political reasons, and the facility continues to degrade while their life is too far extended. Fukushima had this issue.

The problem at Fukushima Daiichi was not refurbishment problems: it was the fact that the emergency batteries and generators were in the basement and accessible from the sea-facing side of the structure.

Fukushima Daini did not have those problems, and thus not much drama happened at it:

* https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Comparison-of-flood-dama...

* https://hbr.org/2014/07/how-the-other-fukushima-plant-surviv...

The two plants are 12 km apart and got hit with the same tsunami.

Re: Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market

#362

What's surprising is the length of time of this project. It was started in 2000, and just completed. That's 23 years of development. These nuclear projects appear to take a significant amount of time. By comparison, this wind turbine project near my parents was approved in 2016 and completed in 2018, providing 78 megawatts of power. Yes that's significantly less than the 1.6 gigawatts of this Finnish power plant. But…

Renewables are fair-weather energy sources, both literally and geopolitically. Hopefully it never comes to that, but off-shore wind is a trivially easy target in a war. Solar too is not very defendable. Power plants are a bit better (in a sub-apocalypse war at least).

Re: Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market

#364
post #48

Comming from a country where nucler power is nowhere near the radar, what is the case against nuclear power? it seems such a nobrainer for me to use

Look at the situation in Ukraine. A huge problem almost nobody is talking about is the largest nuclear plant in Europe was just captured by an invading military force just over a week ago. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaporizhzhia_Nuclear_Power_P...

Re: Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market

#365

What I find incredible is: Once this fully ramps up, this one power plant is expected to satisfy 14% of the entire country's electricity needs. 7 of these could power an entire country, 24/7.

A grid based exclusively on 7 power plants would be highly centralized. If one of those goes down, there goes 14% of your country’s entire supply.

Re: Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market

#366

What's surprising is the length of time of this project. It was started in 2000, and just completed. That's 23 years of development. These nuclear projects appear to take a significant amount of time. By comparison, this wind turbine project near my parents was approved in 2016 and completed in 2018, providing 78 megawatts of power. Yes that's significantly less than the 1.6 gigawatts of this Finnish power plant. But…

Olkiluoto 3 suffered significant delays and cost overruns. My impressions, based on recollection I got reading the newspapers during these two decades, are:

1. Bad management of construction project, almost near corruption level stupidity. Many constructions tasks outsourced to contractors who outsourced them to contractors who outsourced them to contractors, making it easy to take "cost-saving" shortcuts and difficult to supervise.

2. Failure of corruption to speed things up: Finnish nuclear safety authorities are not easily bribed, so when issues with bad quality of welds, concrete, boiler valves and safety electronics were identified (all this from memory, these were separate incidents), the issues could not be smoothed over and ignored with well-placed thick envelopes. The authorities would demand the construction crew to tear stuff apart and do again, properly. And if it didn't pass, then again. And again.

Most of the issues I have read about do not sound like "nuclear technology" failures, more about failures in building a big pressurized boiler power plant. The nuclear part comes in by authorities requiring high quality. They couldn't make good enough concrete bed on a first try, that isn't some super novel space technology.

It mostly reminds me of similar kind of mismanagement that plagues many big construction projects run by big corps managed by suits. During same time frame city of Helsinki wasted amazing amount of money in a "automated metro car" subway upgrade project they bought from Siemens, which ultimately didn't work and had to be scrapped.

(edit. City of Helsinki decided to "automate" city subway metro system in 2006, contract signed with Siemens in 2008, originally planned to be completed in 2011. Project was postponed several times and effectively scrapped in 2016. Tried googling most recent news, the lower district court had given judgement in 2021, parties likely to appeal.)

Re: Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market

#367
post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without including storage and overbuilding of solar and wind to provide the same capacity factor as nuclear it is not a fair comparison, so it doesn’t point out how uneconomical this nuclear project is. The attractiveness of 1.6 GW of nuclear power is that it is carbon free, statistically the safest, it is firm energy that can be depended upon 24x7x365, and fuel costs are so trivial nobody even brings them up. All of…

> so it doesn’t point out how uneconomical this nuclear project is. It does insofar as it matters for capital. Who wants to invest in a plant that will take at least ten years (but probably more with cost overruns in the billions) before they see a ROI? Especially when the cost per MWH from a renewable project that will be online in 2 years with less risk is already comparable if not more competitive.

but is a renewable project that matches the capabilities of a nuclear project (to the same degree of reliability and availability) really the same cost?

you gotta compare like-for-like. If the solar project that takes 2 years only provide power half the time, then you need double the size to provide the same amortized level of power at night. You also need some form of storage. And that's if you don't have a spate of bad weather preventing it from working - so to amortize that problem you'd need to build yet larger...

Re: Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market

#368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>statistically the safest The worst case of nuclear, it is worse than the worst case of solar/wind. So even if it were rational for humanity, it might not be rational for a country. I'm having trouble picturing how it is safer than solar though.

The statistics wrap rooftop solar into the “solar” mix so all those DIY/fly-by-night installers who don’t use safety equipment while working at heights and end up killings themselves make solar by far the deadliest energy source in terms of deaths per MW capacity installed.

Bullshit. Coal and petroleum are way deadlier than rooftop solar, even without diluting it with industrial solar installations.

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all...

Re: Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market

#369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'll need three times more to power all the standby devices in the US, and nobody is doing something as simple as to powering down their tv/console when they stop using it. People don't even unplug their chargers after their phone is charged.

Seems like there are two colossal wastes of energy that need to be fixed.

it's not a waste if the receiver of the service is paying for the service.

Re: Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market

#370
post #332
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that markets are supremely bad at building a stable electricity grid. So on one hand wind and solar are getting cheaper per MW, but it doesn't include the effect they have on destabilising both the grid and electricity markets - in fact, solar getting cheaper is probably going to cause a stop on buildout in some places, because the price of solar MW is going to be too low to deal with all the time you'…

The issue is, that in a traditional electrical system, you need both base load and dispatchable power plants. And while nuclear power plants work as base load, they're really bad for dispatchable power, both economically and in how they work. So if you want to base an electrical grid solely on nuclear power without additional fossil fuel plants, you need either a lot of often unused (and thus very, very expensive) nu…

That's why I'd rather see a variable sink like electrolysers producing green hydrogen for non-electricity related purposes or disconnected operations. A mix of renewable and nuclear that, instead of curtailment, uses excess renewable production for other purposes.
Post reply on HN